So, after running through the last batch of updates, I once again ran into the "no matter how many times you reboot, it will never come back up" problem, so decided to once again start from scratch .
The install went well, I installed opennntpd ,ugraded pacman right away, then all available updates rebooted and all was well.
So I then installed screen, which successfully installed, but failed to run:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'error while loading shared libraries: libelf.so.1')
So, i solved it by installing the elfutils
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'pacman -S elfutils')
I am just putting this here, in case anyone else runs into it